The Angel and the Pool
by MissingSpoon
Summary: The Deepstalker shares hope to the dark, for better or for worse; year 9 after conviction.


If I focus, clench my brow with desperate determination and squint my vision she appears almost angelic before me; backlit by the violet luminesce of our secret pool. If I strain to hang on to this façade I see her delicate form wade through the sparkling waters with childlike wonder and appreciation, her fingers lightly brushing at its surface. If I hope, despite the pooling dread in my gut, I feel her heart and know I'm able to get through.

As I open my eyes and relax my denial I watch as the admiring smile shifts from one born of feeling to one placed there by a modeler whose only sense of one comes from third hand; stretched and held to sickening display by unseen calipers. I watch the subtle twitches and changes of the annelids in her flesh as they try to pass as something from this world. She watches me with that desperate need, I struggle to remain in the moment; carried on spores as I contemplate what I've done. Her failure to grasp something so endemic to having a soul fills me with sorrow and sickness.

Her probing questions arrive at my feet; like an exposed nerve she awaits my reply, hungry to experience my vision, desperate to taste its comfort only to flay it still before it could ever reach her heart. I glance away and choose my words carefully; always my maddening struggle, to know there is some magical combination of these noises that will unlock a door for her; to know I will fail to find it. Again.

I take a slow, calming breath to supress the parts of me that want to run, flee this alien creature, to destroy it before it can infect anyone else, to hold her in my arms as I emboss a cosmic apology for her suffering. I brush away an unneeded weakness from eye and steel myself for the horror of her look. There it is. As I knew it would be.

That look.

She stares at me with her inhuman, caliper smile; eyes pleading for deliverance from her pain while at the same time defying the act with a contempt that brings me to a cold sweat and fills me with fear.

My answer elicits some wellspring of foreign joy and wonder unseen in this corner of the Underdark and I count my breaths as I wait for the worm to turn. There. She rides the high of my vision and finds a way to poison it, twist it to suit the worldview that protects her.

I give her my best smile, and let her have it. She knows something is wrong but can't process it. We continue like this is a healthy conversation. We are healthy people in a healthy place with bright futures in the dark.

My facetiousness is swallowed by the walls I've erected to keep me alive. I'll make the Rothes laugh later. Case and point.

She's gone quiet now… no… she is nervous about something. My mind races to stay a head of her as I quest my empathy forward, a great sail to capture the slack wind of her condition. She says my name; she likes to do that I think. It has a positive relief to the horror of her life though she does not notice this.

So she says my name with the judiciousness of a soothing balm.

She's terrified, wants my approval, fears it… The moment passes, and she's killed that thought; declares I need hers now. I see it on her face before she even opens her mouth. She's alone in there for a moment and I savour this brief connection before being shut out once more.

She makes her request, demands it with a veracity that denies her earlier apprehension. Denies us of the answers it might yield. The healing.

The request makes me bristle, its price is my pride. Something I have had to keep malleable to survive down here. I jump through the necessary hoops needed to make it seem like the right thing to do. I still have hope.

I surrender to her the real-estate of my left forearm, in steep competition against the claw marks and sporeburns and caustic visitations from my many predators and prey. I tell myself that I'm more then the sum of these well used parts. My serene rage and hungry preservation will see me through.

Or so I tell myself.

I use this moment to steal control and assault her shadow with my vulnerability once more. I mourn the fading symbol of my old life as the encroaching creep of the Underdark buries the salmon I once bore proudly on my arm.

I'm rewarded for my irrational quest by blinding pain. I lament its frequent visitation with the stoicism of a well abused spouse.

Its soon over and I process once more the loss of agency upon my flesh. I will wrap it cleanly and burry it beneath sodden wool and hides until I forget its there.

I will never forget its there.


End file.
